Beverage products with a cloudy or opaque appearance are well known in the art. The cloudy or opaque appearance of these beverage products is typically produced by incorporating a beverage emulsion into the beverage. Beverage emulsions can be classified as either flavor emulsions or cloud emulsions. Beverage flavor emulsions provide the beverage with flavor and cloudiness, whereas beverage cloud emulsions provide primarily cloudiness. Both types of beverage emulsions are composed of an oil phase and a water phase and they are classified as oil-in-water emulsions. In an oil-in-water emulsion the oil phase is uniformly dispersed in the continuous water phase in the form of fine droplets. It is this oil droplet dispersion that gives a beverage its cloudy or opaque appearance.
An emulsion is thermodynamically an unstable system which has a tendency to revert to its original state of two immiscible liquids (two phase system). If the oil phase is lighter than the aqueous phase of the beverage, it will separate and rise to the top of the container. This phenomenon is described as creaming and can manifest itself by an unsightly condition known as ringing in the neck of the bottle containing the beverage product. If the oil phase is heavier than the aqueous phase of the beverage, it will settle to the bottom of the container. This condition is referred to as sedimentation and usually appears as a sediment in the bottom of the bottle containing the beverage product.
In order to prevent ringing or creaming when the oil phase is lighter than the aqueous phase of the beverage, a weighting agent is typically incorporated into the oil phase of a beverage emulsion. Weighting agents can also be called density adjusting agents, because they are added to flavor oils in order to increase the oil phase density. They are materials that are oil soluble, that have little or no flavor of their own, and that have densities higher than flavor oils.
Prior to 1970 brominated vegetable oil (BVO) was the weighting agent of choice for beverage emulsions due in part to its high density. However, in 1970 BVO was banned in the United Kingdom because of concern about the accumulation of bromine in body fat from ingestion of BVO and was regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States to allow a maximum of 15 ppm in beverages. To impart a high degree of cloudiness to a beverage, such as approximately the amount of cloudiness in orange juice, for example, requires an amount of oil (delivered by the emulsion) that cannot be adequately weighted with BVO at its legal limitation at 15 ppm. In other words, BVO is ineffective at levels of 15 ppm or less at weighting emulsions that are used at relatively high levels in beverages to deliver relatively high levels of cloudiness.
Therefore, after the regulation of BVO, it was necessary for the beverage industry to find other appropriate materials for use as weighting agents. In the United States ester gum is a material approved by the FDA for use as a weighting agent but with a limit of 100 ppm maximum in beverages. In Canada, the permitted weighting agent is sucrose acetate isobutyrate, and for countries belonging to the Council of Europe, dammar gum. The shortcomings of all of these weighting agents are that none of them are universally approved by all countries and they have a much lower density than BVO. Because of the lower density of ester gum, sucrose acetate isobutyrate and dammar gum compared to BVO, beverages which contain emulsions containing these weighting agents tend to exhibit creaming or ringing. Moreover, like BVO, because their usage is limited, one cannot adequately weight the amount of oil needed in an emulsion to provide a high degree of cloudiness to a beverage. Furthermore, many consumers object to the presence of such additives in their food or beverage products. As a result, a stable beverage emulsion has become more difficult to make than when BVO could be used without limitation.
It has now been found, however, that it is possible to prepare stable beverage products which contain a cloud emulsion, but which do not require weighting agents. In order to provide stability to the beverage compositions herein without the use of weighting agents, the emulsion used herein has a particular ratio of stabilizer to oil and a particular mean particle size and particle size distribution for the oil droplets within the emulsion.